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Everquest Next Landmark

February 9, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #4

This morning I have scarfed my tasty oatmeal and downed my huge skull mug full of coffee. Now I am ready to break some of my own rules. Namely I am writing this morning what I had intended to write last week. At the point of last Sunday I had Everquest Next Landmark in my hands for roughly 48 hours, so that in itself was a bit rule breaking since previously my Steampowered Sunday posts were literally me playing the game and then writing my impression of it. However since the Landmark servers spent most of Sunday down, and I could not gather up the screenshots I wanted, I ended up writing a different post and skipping Steampowered Sunday all together. This week, I am picking up where I intended. Next week we will return to my normal slapshod impression posts of a game from my steam list, but this week is devoted to Landmark.

Everquest Next Landmark

Firstly before digging into this post, you have to understand something. Everquest was my first real MMO. While I had played quite a bit of Phantasy Star Online over on the Dreamcast, EQ was the game that got me hooked on the genre. As a result I have this massive soft spot in my heard for all things Norrath. I love the setting, the pantheon of gods, the racial tension… and while I just cannot bring myself to go back to the original Everquest, I always keep EQ2 installed and at the ready for when I need a nostalgic binge. So back in August during SOE Live 2013 when they announced Everquest Next, the game they had kept pretty well under wraps until that point… to say the least I was extremely interested. While I had deep concerns about the class design for Next I was absolutely pumped at the prospect of this new thing they called Landmark.

Minecraft++

I believe it was Jesse Cox that called Everquest Next Landmark, Minecraft on Crack… but in truth that is neither fair to Minecraft nor Landmark. It is very much the case that a game like this simply would not exist were it not for Notch and his vision to create a fully destructable cube world in Minecraft. Landmark is more akin to Minecraft Evolved or to use the codemonkey term… Minecraft++. The world feels completely different at first, but as you dig into it, the same kinds of logic that we adapted to while branch mining for diamonds in Minecraft mostly apply here to. The difference is, that with Landmark it feels like they are only scratching the surface of what they can do with the engine. They have grand plans to use Landmark as a testbed for ideas that will eventually work their way into the eventual Everquest Next product.

The world of Landmark is arranged as a group of “Islands” assigned to a specific server that are connected by a network of the Combine Spires. First I have to say how pumped I am to see the Combine Spire concept visualized so wonderfully in this world. It just wouldn’t feel like a EQ game without the spire travel network. My only desire would be for them to eventually give us a hearthstone type construct that lets us fast travel to our claim. For those of us who were not lucky enough to get claims near the spires, it becomes a trek each time we want to get to our claim to do work.

Your Claim in the World

Right now the claims system works pretty well, but each of the worlds is so full that it become a crapshoot to try and find anyplace to set down roots. Every grey colored flag represents some players claim on Liberation/Pingo where I set down roots. The blue flag represents my home, and it is a fair clip from the teleport spires. When I managed to get into game the Saturday after release, all of the tier 1 and tier 2 zones were essentially full, and there was nothing at all even vaguely close to one of the spires. Right now the game allows you to plunk down a claim in a freeform fashion so long as it is a certain amount of space away from any nearby claims. The problem with this is it allows for some inefficient use of space.

What I would love to see is a system more like Trove with fixed claim points that you just walk up to and take over. This does two things that are really important. Firstly it allows for the space to be divided up for maximum efficiency letting a fixed number of players inhabit each and every map. Secondly… and this is huge… it allows for a “No Vacancy” sign of sorts to be placed on the islands that simply have no room left at all. Right now a brand new player has to teleport from island to island until they find one that looks like it has a bit of free space… sometimes running out there only to find that a new claim cannot be placed. My friend Rae went through this process yesterday and I have to say it sounded extremely frustrating.

Your Pick and A Dream

You are dropped into this world with only the most basic of supplies. Currently everyone playing the game has the founders pick, which is a combination of the lowest pick axe and a pretty high tier axe allowing them to mine copper, stone and dirt and chop down all but the largest trees. Once this goes beta however, most players will enter the game with the Stone Pick and Stone Axe, much slower versions of the founders pick. In order to progress you have to gather a seriously large number of resources. Currently the conversion rate is generally 100 raw resources to 1 finished resource. To make your first upgrade, the copper pick you need to gather 1000 copper, be lucky enough to get 10 elemental copper a rare drop, and gather up 1000 plain wood logs. Then on top of that… not all Copper Picks are created equal. They range from very slow green quality picks to truly amazing legendary quality picks that cut through stone like butter.

At this point I feel like a lot of the resource costs need to be balanced but they do give a player something to shoot for. For example my next tier upgrade of pick requires me to gather up 6,000 plain wood, 90 sapphire, 30 extremely rare elemental cobalt, 500 also rare burled wood, and 3000 cobalt ore. To make it worse… to even craft this I need to upgrade my crafting machines to the next tier. You start off with access to a basic forge at the combine spires, and then after that you need to craft your own machines… or find a very kind member that has all of the crafting machines out in the open on their own claim. This is one of the things I am loving the most about Landmark so far… it is building a little community.

I am going to draw a comparison that rarely gets drawn in a positive light. The crafter camaraderie reminds me so much of the early days of Horizon. That game was ahead of its time in so many ways, but primarily in the great crafting system that made it a positive thing for crafters and adventurers alike to work together on these massive scale public works projects. I remember spending hours as a Reaver guarding crafters as they brought loads of materials to be applied to one of the big bridges that would then connect up to a brand new untouched island. The crafter gear was not suited for combat, and was needed to be able to carry the maximum amount of materials to the work sight, so an alliance sprung up so that these crafters could be ferried safely from the nearest resource field to the very dangerous work sight.

In a very similar spirit, players are dedicating their claim to becoming a crafting hub for their island. The above claim is just off the spires in Liberation/Hollows and belongs to a player that I don’t even know named Linerra. But she has so graciously opened it up to the public, and every night this place becomes a hub of players crafting up new bits for their own claims. I am not sure she will ever fully know how much I appreciate what she is doing. While I want to make the latest machines, when it comes time for me to craft my cobalt pick I will likely visit her hub, instead of gathering the 80 Elemental Cobalt, 8000 Cobalt Ore, 9000 Tungsten Ore, and 6000 Amaranthine to craft the Amaranthine Forge needed to create it.

I have been surprised that my own claim has become a hub of sorts for my area of Pingo, so I have the motivation to eventually upgrade all of my machines to the highest level. I have since moved the crafting machines from my porch to the undercroft, but I left a note in my claim banner indicating where they can now be found. Awesome thing is, I have struck up a friendship with a few of the players who visit my home regularly to craft. This sense of being neighborly is a really interesting dynamic to me. Yesterday as I was working on the third and fourth floors of my forest temple I was constantly having players swing by and say hello.

Building Tool Progression

One of the things that is drawing mixed reception is the gating of building tool mechanics. When you start the game you are given a package that contains the Add, Remove and Heal tools that can be used to build on your claim. The above image is of me clearing the voxels from my claim with the remove tool. These can be scaled and changed in shape and the material and texture they apply, but represent a very rudimentary “minecraft esc” way of building. Later there are much more powerful tools like the selection tool that allows you to apply a material to a much larger section, or use the really powerful cut and paste functions. There has been a bit of grumbling that it takes so much farming before you get these more advanced tools. I however think this is probably a good idea.

Sticking with the three simplest tools forces you to “learn the basics” before getting into something that can cause issues if you are not careful. Selecting large areas lets you do something really quickly, but at the same time you can also make some pretty big mistakes with it. Most of my building is still done with the add/remove tools, and I tend to use the selection and smooth tools extremely sparingly. I have heard that the line tool is even more powerful when you get it, but similarly if you don’t have a basic understanding of how to get the most of using the fixed tools on and off the grid, it becomes easier for you to make mistakes when handed the really game changing tools later on.

The above video is a really good resource for showing off the basics of crafting with tools on your claim. While I have been piddling with this game for a little over a week now, I still feel like I am constantly picking up tricks. The best thing about the system is that it is so simple and easy to gasp, especially for anyone who has ever played Minecraft. At the same time it is infinitely complex in the number of things you can do with it. People are creating some really crazy things, especially using the smooth tool to even go so far as to create massive sculptures. When they finally open the player studio, it will be interesting to see just what sorts of widgets players have constructed. Right now the only thing of any worth that I have crafted is a prefab staircase that I have used multiple times in my forest temple to move between levels.

Only Scratching the Surface

It really feels like we have only begun to scratch the surface for what Landmark can be. I know they plan on adding in a full combat system with randomly spawned encounters, as well as multiple tiers of exploration to each of the islands. They showed digging down into caverns and lava chambers in the launch video, and from all I have heard that is still very much planned for landmark. Even without all of that the game is extremely addicting and is scratching every builder itch I could possibly have. That is not to say however that it is a finished product in any fashion. The thing I warn players before they plunk down their money to buy their way into the Alpha process… remember that this is an Alpha in every sense of the word. Stuff is broken at times… and that is okay.

I grumbled a bit last week as I had my claim completely wiped five or six times before they got to the bottom of the issues with saving voxel changes to the database. I expect this, I knew what I was getting into… and I have begun building in a really large way knowing that at some point down the road it is all going to get wiped into oblivion. By building and testing I am ultimately helping to make a better finished product. I’ve alpha and beta tested hundreds upon hundreds of games at this point, and this is something that I just take as part of the price for helping to shape the end result. But for players who are used to the “almost finished game being called an alpha” definition of recent years… expect things to go haywire.

After saying all of that, I fully believe that this game is worth investing in. The game that is there is extremely fun, but we will be seeing so much more over the coming months. In the week we have already seen a handful of patches and new featured added in like the ability to hit the down arrow in the crafting window to easily craft the maximum number of items. Each time I log in, I find something new that got patched in when I was not paying attention. I love watching a game get created before my eyes, and the level of transparency the SOE folks have been giving us is phenomenal. I look forward to working together to help craft what eventually ends up being Everquest Next and beginning a epic gaming tradition.

Beardly Dedication

February 8, 2014 by Belghast

Press NDA Lifted

There has been a lot of confusion in the last 24 hours as Zenimax has lifted the NDA just far enough to allow a bunch of press outlets to post stories. Massively crafted a really poorly worded tweet stating that the ESO NDA Had lifted. Even though they followed up almost immediately with a correction stating that it only applies to the press and media beta… it has caused massive amounts of confusion. As a result there are so many video leaks going on right now, a good number of them seem to have an axe to grind with the game in general. I am still very firmly under a gag order but I feel that is a bit of a disservice to the game as a whole.

Most of the albeit scathing reviews of the game seem to be missing the general point. I feel like right now a lot of people are going into this game with the expectation of it being something that it is not. This is the problem of a broad game like The Elder Scrolls. Every player has a certain way that they want to play the game, and if their chosen game play isn’t supported then obviously it is a horrible game. Apparently there are players out there who legitimately do nothing but steal stuff from stores, or players who do nothing but kill quest giver NPCs. These are just a few of the fringe game play styles that I have seen mentioned on the more public forums that certain fragments of the population are up in arms over.

Thing is… the game seems to be selling extremely well. The game has firmly been on the top 10 best sellers list on Amazon.com since releasing. So lots of people still have interest in the game despite the sour grapes reviews that are coming out. At this point I feel like Zenimax needs to open the flood gates and let the actual fans who have been sticking by the title speak for it. This is not an insignificant number of players mind you, but each of us is bound by the same NDA gag order, and unable to say a single thing in defense of the title. Keeping the NDA in place, and stating that there will not be a fully open beta before release… only serves to give the public the impression that the game has something to hide. The game has absolutely nothing to hide, and I look forward to the day when I can talk about it without hedging everything I say in grand generalizations. The video I linked above is my favorite of the batch of “reviews” and Dan Bull seems to “get it”.

Forest Temple that Isn’t

I have still been plugging away on building my “Forest Temple” and posted some photos the other day yesterday on the EQ Next Reddit. Turns out my name is a bit controversial. I am building a temple in a deeply forested region of the Pingo island, so to me that is a Forest Temple. But apparently to a lot of people that has a specific meaning, which is the Forest Temple from Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. I am just too old for this to have a significant meaning to me I guess. Ocarina of Time came out when I was in college, and while I played it and enjoyed it… it really didn’t imprint on me as being anything more than a fun game. A Link to the Past is my Zelda game and the one I hold up as the pinnacle above all others. For me the Zelda franchise is best in its 2D form.

So to clariify… I will try and come up with a better name for my place, because I don’t want to give the impression that I am trying to build “The Forest Temple”. At this point I have massive amounts of resource farming to complete the temple. I want to do one more floor and a ramparts area at the top, as well as build out the undercroft more fully. Right now I am planning on moving the craft machines from the porch area to the undercroft. I hope I can unlock the paint tool because I think with that I can help to age the temple with little bits of mossy grass on the stone. I also want to do some work to make things more intricate, but i figure over time I can work out the fine details. I posted an album of pictures of my most recent progress.

Beardly Dedication

This is one that my wife suggested so I am running with it. Early my Sophomore year in High School I started growing a beard, and unlike my friends who were cursed with the inability to do so… I was able to grow one rather successfully. From that point until today I have only been clean shaven twice… and both of those times were horrible mistakes. Granted I vacillate back and forth between a full beard and a moustache/goatee combination… but for the majority of 22 years I have been proudly dedicated to beardom. Basically my beard started as a way to make me look older, because I suffer from a baby face. If I were to shave right now at age 37… I would look like I was about fourteen. Well maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is not a good thing to say the least.

The first time I shaved my beard was during my Junior year. I was completely smitten with a girl who barely knew I existed. I asked her out to the prom and she accepted, but she really pressured me to shave off my goatee at the time. I should have stuck to my guns, because quite honestly nothing about that night was worth the pricetag of shaving my beard. I did not realize I was mired quite so deeply in the friend zone as I actually was, and at least if I had my beard I could have stroked it while pondering the situation as she danced with someone else the majority of the night. Beard stroking apparently is a legitimate thing, and it actually spurs on mental activity.

The second time I shaved it… I did it mostly by accident. I took off a little too much from one side while trying to even out my beard. Rather than shaving down to a goatee, I decided that my wife had never actually seen me clean shaven. At that point we had been together five or six years, and she was polite about it… but told me to grow it back as soon as I could and to never do it again. Apparently the beard suits me, either that or she couldn’t handle the fact that she looked like she was married to a teenager. I figure at some point when I do actually want to look younger I can instantly loose 20 years by shaving, or at least this is my planned exit strategy. The actual secret to my beard is more akin to the fact that I simply hate shaving and will do whatever I can to avoid doing so. At one point this year I was sporting a beard that would make the guys of duck dynasty take notice… but that was more a test of just how long I could let it go than anything else.

Budgie Week Fiasco

February 7, 2014 by Belghast

Another Friday, Moar Fodder

Well another week has passed and it is once again time for Friday Forum Fodder. I have admittedly not been following the discussion around the interwebs as closely as I usually do during the week. I have a massive backlog of unread blog posts in my reader as spending the first half of the week sick and the second half desperately trying to play catch-up has left me with less lollygagging time. I did stumble across a couple of things that I found interesting so the topics are primed and ready to go.

WoW Up to 7.8 Million Subscribers

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3741-WoW-Up-to-7-8-Million-Subscribers

Apparently yesterday Blizzard had their Q4 2013 earnings call, and announced that they were currently sitting at 7.8 Million subscribers, which surprisingly is a 200k subscriber bump over the 7.6 announced in the Q3 2013 earnings call. Of course we all know that Blizzcon happened between those two calls, and that we had the announcement of the Warlords of Draenor expansion. However 200,000 players seems like an awful lot to simply account for the “Blizzcon Bump”. On Argent Dawn I have said before that we have been experiencing a bit of a renaissance with a large number of players coming back that I have not seen since Wrath, and some of them not even since Burning Crusade. This feels like something more substantial than just interest in the new and shiny bauble called Warlords.

With the release of Rift, something happened in the populace, a fracturing of sorts. That was the very first time I saw people leave WoW in a semi-permanent fashion. Always before when a new product released, players would drift away from the game only to return a month or two later. Something was different with the release of Cataclysm that broke the inertia of players to stay in one place. I myself was gone for a little over two years, and during most of that time I never saw myself seriously returning. For whatever reason I think a lot of us are resigned to the fact that the “wow-killer” simply will never exist. All of this effort spent trying to find a better experience than World of Warcraft just wound up leading us right back to the original.

I personally have come to realize that what WoW provides just does not exist in the same quantity or quality elsewhere. Sure various games do various components of the total WoW experience better, but no one game hits as many high points as Blizzard does. I have reached a point where I am mostly okay with the games flaws… and while I wish that it did certain things better, I can accept the fact that what it does is for the benefit of the many not the few. There are niche games out there that will scratch the various itches I have that WoW simply cannot. So while I am back in WoW I am also still very much playing Rift, TSW, Everquest Next Landmark and will be adding Elder Scrolls Online to that lineup. I have reached a point where I am okay with playing multiple games at the same time.

The beauty of World of Warcraft is that it is the game of consensus. It is that game that everyone plays when they can’t get anyone to agree on any other game. People play WoW because people play WoW. More than anything the large community that comes part and parcel with playing the game was the thing I had been missing since leaving it. When you play wow, you are instantly a member of something larger than yourself, and that is just an experience that is lacking with any of the other games. Don’t get me wrong, the other game communities are great, especially the fledgling Everquest Next community bolstered by SOE’s new sense of transparency. However it is still lacking in sheer size and volume of players. The Blizzard gaming community is big enough to support everyone, and that is a really rare and special thing.

Budgie Week Fiasco

http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/general-discussion/412505-budgie-week-guide.html

Firstly I want to say, this is less about the specific thread but more about the Budgie Week event. I latched onto the guide threat by Seatin mostly because it was the only really active thread out there that coalesced all of the viewpoints in one place, whether or not he actually intended that to happen. Seatin does a great job of supporting the community with his guides and videos, so nothing I say should be held as a reflection on that. Additionally I love the folks at Trion, especially the team that is presently working on Trove. That is such a great game and the open process is so refreshing, including the use of Reddit as their primary forums. Additionally when Rift went free to play, I considered it to be one of the more just and equitable models. However some of the things they have been doing with the cash shop are feeling more than a little shifty.

Awhile back some of my friends were frustrated over the Squirrel mount that was released, in that they missed the ridiculously short window it was available for purchase outright in the game. This was really the beginning of a new trend, offering a cool mount for a very short time, and then putting a similar mount in a cash shop lootbox as the primary means of obtaining it. This was the case for the Squirrel mount, the Mech mount, and now looks to be the same basic thing going on with the Budgie mount. The shifty part this time is that they introduced a world event to make it seem as though you can actually acquire the mount that way. Problem is… with this being only a 7 day event it is simply impossible to gain enough of the “bird seed” currency doing these quests alone.

According to Seatin’s guide, if you got in on the first day of the event there is a maximum of 210 bird seed that you can obtain. The mount costs 850 bird seed on the vendor, meaning there is simply no way to obtain it without somehow augmenting your seed count. It turns out right now they are offering a limited time cash box that has a chance of dropping a different colored budgie mount, and you are guaranteed between 6 and 10 birdseed per box. The average seems to be 8 per trove, so in theory you need roughly 80 of these cash shop boxes to be able to purchase the bird. Granted you have a chance from each to get the OTHER budgie mount, but we aren’t even taking this into account. Essentially even doing your quests religiously every day, you would have to spend roughly $300 on the cash shop to be certain you get this mount while it is available.

Now Daglar has posted on the forums that this is a promo event, and they intend to run it several times a year, and by participating in all of them you should be able to get the mount. Even saying that… it still feels extremely bad seeing this unfold. This is the same kind of crap that I see over in SWTOR with making most of the truly unique looking mounts only available through the random chance of a cash shop box. The difference there is that you can actually post the items once you have gotten them on the auction house… whereas the cash shop loot in Rift is either soul bound or bound to your account. This whole event just leaves me feeling a little dirty for having supported their shirt to free to play so actively. I still think Rift is a great game, and I still think more or less it is a good value… they are just doing a few unsavory things that make me a little sad inside.

Bel Goes to Nasa

This mornings factoid digs pretty deep into the annals of time. Once upon a time I wanted to grow up to be a Scientist. I am not really sure what happened along the way to change that life ambition. If I had to guess it was probably the fact that AP Chemistry ate my lunch, but I managed to get out of it with a B, which seemed pretty damned good at the time. All that aside, I did really and truly want to be a Scientist, so I took the yearly ritual of the science fair extremely seriously. Through boy scouts I had gotten into model rocketry, so when it came time to pick a project I thought it would be interesting to do something related to that. With copious help from my father, we constructed a wind tunnel that ran on a shop vac, and proceeded to test the effects of airflow based on various model rocket fin shapes.

I think the key to winning a science fair is to have something cool to look at in your booth. I am sure there were many students that had more scientifically sound studies than I did, but I had cool photos of the pattern each of the fins had made. We tied string to each of the fins so that we could watch the pattern the thread made based on the airflow. The contrails that were created gave a clear picture of how each shape varied and was something nice and concrete that the judges to latch onto. I won the local level science fair and managed to move up to regional’s, but this was not something really new to me, because my pantograph had done the same my six grade year. In all honesty repeating a victory at the local level would have been more than enough for me.

When I got to regional’s however I was shocked at just how excited the judges seemed to be about my exhibit. So when it came down to time to present the awards, I don’t really remember what place I got in the main competition, because it was quickly overshadowed by the “special” award that I won. I got a trip for me, my family and my science teacher to NASA’s Johnson Space center. I have to say it was one of the cooler things I have experienced. A lot of the trip is a haze at this point, but I remember walking through a prototype of what would eventually become the international space station. I also remember getting to play around in the shuttle flight simulator, and meeting actual astronauts. All of which were pretty heady things for my little wannabe scientist seventh grader mind. But of course, High School happened… and I discovered computers and programming… and I jettisoned the thoughts of being a scientist out the airlock and moved on.

Rocky Horror Rejection

February 6, 2014 by Belghast

Of Large Templates

After piddling a bit in Rift and running Onyxia on the three character that can easily solo her, I settled into Everquest Next Landmark and attempted to recreate my forest temple. I had managed to successfully template the entire structure and suck back up all of the material night before last, so my hope was that it would in fact be as simple as plunking down the template and moving on. The problem is, large templates are extremely hard to work with. After spending an hour placing and undoing the template trying to get it just right, I finally said screw it and started from scratch again. The above shot shows a rare moment when my claim is flooded in sunlight.

The biggest problem I have noticed with templates is that they seem to align to the smallest block size instead of whatever block size you happen to have set as your tool. When you are trying to move a template that takes up your entire claim… it becomes extremely hard to determine when exactly it is in the right spot. I managed to get it pretty damned close at times, but never quite perfect. In the above image I had run out of stone while working on the flooring, but I have since fixed that and finished the first floor for now. Eventually I will build a staircase up to the second floor, but until I have enough stone to make a second floor that point is moot. The temple as it is right now has taken roughly 200,000 stone.

The last thing I was working on last night before logging was building out the front porch area. There is a ramp leading up now that I smoothed out and a stone railing of sorts. My plan is to keep all of my crafting machines out here so that anyone who happens to be moving past my claim can use them. That has been one of the really cool things about Landmark is that all of these player towns have sprung up. It reminds me quite a bit of Horizons, in that a little crafting community is starting to spring up here and there. It would be really cool if they added some large scale public works type projects that they players can work on. I remember guarding crafters as they carried loads of ore and stone to the various bridge projects in Horizons. While there were so many flaws in that game, it really was innovative in its social crafting systems.

Right now my chief mission is to gather enough gold and burled wood to be able to craft the Golden Axe. I have heard you can gather wood much faster using it, and I am really hoping that it will also allow me to fell the largest of trees. I know it is possible to take them down, because I watched someone doing it the other night. Essentially to truly complete the first floor I will need lots and lots of trees. I want to put wood braces to support the second floor and have them jut out slightly from the sides of the building. I have always liked that look but to be able to do them I need a ton of wood. Additionally while searching for the gold ore needed… I hope to gather enough stone to begin construction on the second floor. Finally there are a few machines that I am missing from my porch, so I want to gather up the bits to make the one that can finish marble especially.

Rocky Horror Rejection

For anyone who has ever been to a live performance of the rocky horror picture show, you know that it is a really raucous occasion. Would you believe that I managed to get kicked out of a showing? While I was in High School the local performing arts theater thought they would be edgy and host a showing of the movie. For starters it was a far more sedate version of the Rocky Horror Picture show. There was no live group dressed as the characters and performing all of the scenes, and no virgin sacrifices. Everyone however did show up with a bag of items needed to do the various tributes to the scenes. Even in its lesser form it was still pretty fun, albeit greatly sanitized.

Things went south when we got to “Over at the Frankenstein Place”. This is the point where everyone in the audience raises their lighters into the air swaying back and forth slowly to simulate the “there’s a light” portion. Not being a smoker, I didn’t have a bic lighter on me… so I decided to improvise. Gathering up a bunch of news paper we had to protect ourselves from the water guns… I decided to craft a torch. I bound the newspaper together tightly and lit that bad boy. This was a classic bad move, because I did not expect it to flame up quite so brightly… and quickly. It was only a few seconds before we realize this was not going to be a good idea in any fashion so we stomped it out.

Moments later a security guard showed up and in his remarkable intellect muttered “all right who did that?”. We gave him our best confused look, and then one of my group pointed down to the rows below us and told him that it was someone down there. The thing you need to know is that we are in a huge concert hall style performing arts theater. We sat roughly midway up the main seating, and everyone else in the theater were bunched together down by the stage. There were a good 25 rows of empty space between us and the next person. The security guard proceeded to go row by row, searching the entire space for the hidden arsonist. All of this time we were absolutely rolling, but trying to keep it down just enough to not tip our hand. Fifteen minutes later the winded guard came back to our row and proclaimed “Very Funny… You are all out of here.”

So the bulk of us all got punted from the show unceremoniously. Looking back now, I could have theoretically started a theater fire, but at the time it sounded like a great idea. No one really seemed to mind getting forced out of the proceedings, since it really was a watered down version of the “real thing”. We wound up driving around for awhile and finally ended up milling around in a park for a while before taking our dates home for the evening. We probably had far more fun loitering than we would have had attending the rest of the show, so I guess in the grand scheme of things everything worked out okay. I just find it funny now because I can state that I got kicked out of the Rocky Horror Picture show.